Thursday, September 23, 2010

It was 45 years ago that Navajo artist Jay DeGroat began telling me Dine creation tales and I started writing them down with the thought of one day making them into a book.

Our first collaboration was printed in Santa Fe and published by David Kherdian of The Giligia Press. The book was called The Shivurrus Plant of Mopant. These were not Navajo stories -- they were poems written by children in a writing workshop that I taught. Jay liked the poems and did illustrations for the book, and it was a good beginning for us.

Over the years, Jay and I did many books but my favorite collaboration is the ancient Navajo healing stories he told about Coyote and Badger and Nuthatch and the other animal people. They all became part of a series of books that Speaking-Volumes has just now re-released. Composer Ray Griffin adds unique sounds and his own brand of high desert jazz, sound effects and the voices of Frog, Toad, Bat and more. Even more than the books I've written, these live recordings bring us to a a place that has been unchanged for thousands of years. Special thanks to the one Jay, three Rays and a Rae, and one Jimmy Blueeyes.

My mom, pictured above, was the original bemailer. She could contact, and be contacted, by friends, family, ghosts, and unborn children. She could predict events that hadn't happened, that were happening, that were going to happen and she seldom knew one from another. Yes, she was psychic. In those days there wasn't email; there was telegraphy, telegrams. That was instantaneous mail in the 1940s. But my mom had a faster form of communication. She would think a thought, I would receive it.

Toward the end of her life she got very good at seeing newspaper headlines before they were in print. Whatever I know, whatever I think I know, I learned from her. She was the original bemailer. If she were here today, she would say -- If you be, you can send bemail. Direct transmission from one to another. God bless her, she was the best. And here is a little tribute to her favorites -- the Pony Express and telepathy.http://www.staythirstymedia.com/201009-049/html/201009-hausman-bemail.html

Gerald Hausman calls himself a "native of the world" after living in so many places in the United States and the West Indies. He spent more than twenty years in New Mexico where many of his American Indian folktales were collected and published. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1945, Hausman has been a storyteller almost since birth. His more than 70 books attest to his love of folklore, a passion instilled by his mother who painted the portraits of Native American chiefs. During his thirty-five years as a storyteller, Gerald has entertained children of all ages at such places as The Kennedy Center, Harvard University, St John's College and in schools from one end of the country to the other. Five audio books have come out in recent years and two of Gerald's books have been made into animated and folkloric films. His books have also been translated into a dozen foreign languages.